[Autistic] Distros

[Paul Tansom]

** Zahn Daltocli <daltocli at gmail.com> [2007-04-24 15:23]:
> Okay... We need to get active, so err... I know a starter!
> 
> What distro do we all use?
** end quote [Zahn Daltocli]

Well I started my Linux life with Caldera 1.1, partly because I saw a
copy in my local PC World (eek!), so that made it easy to get hold of,
and partly because I'd read about the efforts that Caldera and Lasermoon
were putting into full Posix compliance and certification - it sounded
good. We all know the way that turned out though, so perhaps the less
said the better :)

I move on to Red Hat for two reasons, but I won't blame him by name
specifically ;) I had a friend at work who was the only other person I
knew at the time using Linux - and that was largely out of curiosity
because I was so keen on it. He had bought a copy of Red Hat 6, but it
took too long to arrive so when he saw a copy that he could get quickly
(that may have been PC World again, I can't remember) he did so and
ended up with a spare. I decided to try it and ended up sticking with it
for a while - all the way to version 7 and the fun of the GCC version
and RPM 4 which put me off totally. The concept of a package that had
dependencies insteada of writing all over the existing installed
versions of files was a breath of fresh air over Windows (mfc42.dll
anybody? how many copies of that did I have kicking around in different
directories in order to keep applications working?).

Then I tried Debian and never looked back, so that covers the past 7
years give or take of my desktop and server side installations. That
said I have been toying with Ubuntu a bit, but I can't decide whether it
is a loyalty to Debian or irritations with Ubuntu that keep me holding
off on switching. I have it on one laptop, which I don't really use,
partly because of dodgy/broken hardware (it has been in a car crash with
me) and partly because I haven't beaten Ubuntu into submission with the
wifi cards I've tried. I've also installed it on one server, and that
was largely forced because I really needed to install on the provided
hardware and it was much easier to do so with Ubuntu than Debian. If I'd
chosen the hardware it would have been different, but as it was I had to
contend with nVidia chipsets on the motherboard and not just for the
graphics. I could have coped with the gigabit nVidia NIC, but trying to
install onto SATA drives driven by a nVidia chipset going straight in as
RAID 1 proved far too much hassle when the 64 bit AMD version of Debian
as well!

So Debian for preference, Ubuntu sometimes to make life easier with
hardware - sadly Ubuntu takes too much tweaking to get it running the
way I want; it is far easier to start further back down the food chain
with Debian than extract all the cruft in Ubuntu. I will have to give
Xubunut another try, but last time I did there were too many
documentation references to things I couldn't find when I was reading up
on how to tweak things the way I liked - although part of this was down
to bits that I consider base system that are in Universe :(

Anyway, long ramble over, back to work :)

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/
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